Interview: Drew Goddard visits 'The Cabin in the Woods'

When it comes to "The Cabin in the Woods," Drew Goddard doesn't want to say too much, because he doesn't want to give too much away.

But he gave it a shot during a visit to Phoenix to promote the movie. Goddard directed and co-wrote it with Joss Whedon, and he worked on Whedon's shows "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel." In addition, Goddard worked on "Lost" and wrote "Cloverfield," so his entertainment credentials are well-established.

"The Cabin in the Woods" was very much a collaborative effort with Whedon, Goddard says, fueled by a common sensibility -- and a little desperation.

Question: It's impossible to say much about the movie without spoiling it, so it's hard to know what to say about it.

Answer: It's tricky, because you want to tell your audience that it's not your everyday, average movie. You want to tell them this is new and different. But you also want to respect that the truth is, the less you know about this film the better. It's more fun the less you know. It's trying to find that balance.

Q: How would you describe it?

A: I don't know what box to put it in, but that makes it more exciting to me. With this movie, we wanted it first and foremost to be fun. We wanted to fit that fun, horror kind of movie. That was one of our goals. When we set out, we didn't want to make a traumatic horror movie where, you know, you're witnessing this grisly (action) on screen. We wanted people to be laughing as much as screaming.

Q: Bringing Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford on board certainly helps the film in that regard.

A: They definitely do, they definitely do. God bless those two. That's one of the fun parts about being a director, is you can make your list of a dream cast, and then we wrote the parts for those two. It was so exciting the day they said yes.

Q: The film has been done for a couple of years, but MGM's bankruptcy has kept it in limbo. Was it frustrating knowing you were sitting on a good movie and not being able to show it?

A: Yeah, it certainly was. But we weren't the only people who got delayed. "The Hobbit" got delayed, and James Bond got delayed. When you see heavyweights like that dropping next to you, you realize this isn't about any one thing. This is way above our pay grade. When you're dealing with billion-dollar bankruptcies there's not a lot you can do. My biggest concern was protecting the movie, because whenever you have a change in management, you never know if someone is going to get what you were doing or not. When Lionsgate moved in and bought the film, they said, "We don't want to change a frame," and I was just tremendously relieved.

Q: The buzz is about twists, but in reality, it's a different take on the horror genre.

A: I've always felt like with "Cabin," it's not as much about twists as it is about escalation. It's not any one thing.

Q: In some respects, it owes more to "Buffy" than straight-up horror.

A: The things that I love are things that are hard to classify. It's not like we tried to be any one thing. The movies I respond to are by guys like the Coen brothers and Edgar Wright, where it's hard to fit them into any one box. Certainly that was the case with us. We're trying to straddle multiple genres.

Q: You and Whedon had worked together before. How did you handle it with "Cabin"? Who did what?

A: We sort of honed our process over the years at "Buffy" and at "Angel." He had the original idea, and then we started working it over and outlining it and figuring out the story over a couple of months, just talking occasionally over dinner or drinks. And once we had an outline we were really happy with, we locked ourselves in a hotel room and said, "We're not allowed to leave this hotel room until we finish the script." So we just wrote 'round the clock for three days and came out with the first draft of the movie. Which is kind of how "Buffy" was. We would spend a long time thinking about the story, but then we'd be so far behind we'd only get a weekend to write an episode.

What you learn is that there's a real energy from not having a lot of time. There's a real energy to not having a net, making yourself just do it. It starts to become more about the creative process itself than it is about thinking, "Oh, is this going to work or is this not going to work?" You don't have a choice. You're just going to do it. And that works really well. Some of our best episodes of "Buffy" were written over a weekend. You can really get in touch with your creative spirit when you're at your most desperate.

Q: "Cabin" must have made for an interesting pitch to the studio.

A: The truth is, we didn't know how to pitch this movie. I don't know how to pitch it in one sentence, I really don't. So we wrote it before we took it to a studio. We wrote the whole script first, because it is such a complicated movie.... We knew that we needed to do all of the work first.